Tiaras and Tears: The problem with the Female Social Media Guru UK Award
You may have caught my previous thoughts on women being under-represented at industry events. So while it’s fantastic to see Social Glue initiate a Female Social Media Guru UK Award it caused a few rumblings and raised some questions for me…
Couldn’t we just recognise these women amongst their peers [male & female]. I think this is the heart of the problem the award is attempting to address.
Jamie has justified thus:
This is a debate we have had over the last few weeks. You are right there should be no division on gender but if you look at speaker panels there clearly is. Hopefully this combats the problem.
The “you missed off so-and-so” outcry was almost certainly due to lack of criteria [it seems to be just something to do with the internet and having a vagina being female] and probably a misconception there’s only a small number of fantastic women in Social Media.
I also found the later ranking of all nominees, with number of votes displayed, in poor taste.
I don’t want to get too down on Jamie. It was intended to address a very real issue and was well intentioned but comparing these women across their diverse areas is bit like like apples and oranges.
Here’s some of my faves and the areas where I think they are Social Media gurus. I’m pleased some of them made the list.
Contribution to the Social Media Industry: KATIE LEE
Aside from being “gadget girl” before anyone else was doing it, Katie Lee co-founded Shiny Media, the UK’s first commercial blog publisher. Over the years she’s been responsible for finding and nurturing a range of online writers and establishing credibility for bloggers in mainstream media.
http://shinykatie.blogspot.com/
Fashion & Social Media: GEMMA CARTWRIGHT
You don’t hear enough about Gemma as she’s been head down managing Shiny Media’s fashion network for the past few years.
You never hear about her work within fashion to promote the benefits of Social Media to the industry and build relationships, particularly in PR, that just didn’t exist before. Graduate Fashion Week, touring agencies to educate, and dealing with the uncomfortable first fumblings of Fashion PRs has been Gemma’s lot. Again she’s made blogger/PR relations seem so normal these days.
Technology & Social Media: SUSI WEASER
Picking up the mantle from Katie Lee is this talented person who left PR to follow the Social Media dream via Shiny Shiny and become a UK trailblazer for online video.
What’s cool is that she’s just launched a business doing this type of thing.
Promoting the cause of women in the industry / Mobile: HELEN KEEGAN
She’s a mover and shaker in mobile regardless of having a vagina being female. What I love is that she’s been so vocal about the lack of women speakers at events that’s got us all questioning this state of affairs.
http://technokitten.blogspot.com/
PR & Social Media: MICHELLE GOODALL
Michelle has been doing this long before most, irrespective of being a woman. If you’d ever read her posts & reports over on econsultancy you’d get that she knows her industry inside and out and is a bit of a hero to PRs like myself. She also just creates great campaigns.
http://econsultancy.com/blog/authors/michelle-goodall-2
Social Media Marketing: SANDRINE PLASSERAUD
If you haven’t heard about Sandrine, despite her tireless blogging (how does she find the time?), it’s because she’s always working to design & deliver awesome campaigns for her clients. She does that by being one of the most authentic users of Social Media working in an agency that I know.
http://sandrineplasseraud.typepad.com/
Social Media & Start-ups / MSM: JEMIMA KISS
Jemima landed on the scene at the Guardian’s Media section and all of sudden Social Media became mainstream. Her enthusiasm gives many new start-ups a much needed helping hand in the beginning. She’s inundated with 1000s of calls and emails daily but still manages to personally respond to tenfold more than she should have to as part of her job.
She constantly gets overlooked, most annoyingly in last year’s Evening Standard 1000 most influential Londoners. (No doubt because of who she writes for).
—-
Of course I know many other wonderful people, both male and female, working in this industry. But with this “girls of social media” theme currently percolating I wanted to take time to give them special mention.
